Communication has a long and rich history of debating the relationship between publics and expertise. James Carey (1989) famously critiqued Walter Lippmann (1922) for an elitist reliance on expertise in the formation of public opinion. Carey preferred Dewey’s (1927) notion of “public,” deeming Lippmann’s stance elitist. Habermas’ public sphere similarly does not favor experts, and communication as a discipline has largely favored publics over expertise. However, Michael Schudson (2008) suggested that Carey’s framing of the Dewey-Lippmann “debate” favoring publics missed important reasons why expertise is vital to democracy. He argued that Lippman’s intent was that “experts were not to replace the public… rather experts were to provide an alternative source of knowledge and policy” (p. 10).

Technology imposes another level of complexity to this debate. By some readings, a need for technological literacies presents a challenge to public communication. Meritocratic or generation-based theories of “digital natives” and “geeks” seem to preclude the formation of broad-based publics (Prensky, 2001). Early concern about a divide of technological access has moved to focus on the unequal distribution of expertise and opportunities to gain it through acquisition of technical skills and media literacies (Jenkins et al., 2009). New forms of experts and expertise have emerged as particularly important to publics, even vital for their existence. Technological intermediaries, such as hackers, are increasingly important to translate and publicize technological issues of public importance (e.g. open data, digital privacy, surveillance). Networked publics on online platforms require expert maintenance work to exist, even when all members of the public need not be experts. The “horizontalist” movement Occupy developed and appropriated technologies to assist the public in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy. Expertise played a vital role that did not preclude a public, but helped it flourish.

We suggest that expertise and publics have always been productively entangled rather than on opposing sides of a binary. This special issue examines the role of technological expertise in constituting publics, maintaining publics, increasing publics’ communicative capacities, influencing existing structures of cultural and governmental power, and connecting with issues of public concern. We ask a set of related questions: how does expertise contribute to the formation of publics and enabling of collective action? Conversely, when does the unequal distribution of expertise inhibit the constitution of publics? How does expertise create public goods? How does it mediate the societal distribution of power? What are the diverse ways expertise can be conceptualized? What is the relationship between technological expertise and other kinds of expertise, such as communicative or social? How does the line between “the public” and “expert” become crossed or blurred?

The debate inside the International Network Working Group (INWG) and the events between 1974 and 1976 that led up to the INWG 96 transport protocol were a small part of a much larger debate going on within the communications and networking industry. This article places the INWG discussions in this wider context to better understand the technical points and implications and their ultimate impact on established business models.

Internet memes—digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection—are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It’s hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn’t generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations.

Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent.

For better or worse—and Milner offers examples of both—memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.

Though web tracking and its privacy implications have received much attention in recent years, that attention has come relatively recently in the history of the web and lacks full historical context. In this paper, we present longitudinal measurements of third-party web tracking behaviors from 1996 to present (2016). Our tool, TrackingExcavator, leverages a key insight: that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine opens the pos- sibility for a retrospective analysis of tracking over time. We contribute an evaluation of the Wayback Machine’s view of past third-party requests, which we find is im- perfect — we evaluate its limitations and unearth lessons and strategies for overcoming them. Applying these strategies in our measurements, we discover (among other findings) that third-party tracking on the web has increased in prevalence and complexity since the first third-party tracker that we observe in 1996, and we see the spread of the most popular trackers to an increasing percentage of the most popular sites on the web. We ar- gue that an understanding of the ecosystem’s historical trends — which we provide for the first time at this scale in our work — is important to any technical and policy discussions surrounding tracking.

The web has now been with us for almost 25 years: new media is simply not that new anymore. It has developed to become an inherent part of our social, cultural, political, and social lives, and is accordingly leaving behind a detailed documentary record of society and events since the advent of widespread web archiving in 1996. These two key points lie at the heart of our in-preparation Handbook of Web History: that the history of the web itself needs to be studied, but also that its value as an incomparable historical record needs to be inquired as well. Within the last decade, considerable interest in the history of the Web has emerged. However, there is no comprehensive review of the field. Accordingly, our SAGE Handbook of Web History will provide an overview and point to future research directions.

The editors, Niels Brügger, Megan Sapnar Ankerson, and Ian Milligan, have over twenty-five chapters in preparation. However, there are a few areas where we are soliciting additional chapters to round out our handbook. The focus of the chapters needs to be on the subject of Web history.

* Business histories of the Web;

* Web governance;

* E-Literature or Web Art;

* History of online social media;

* Dot-com Start-ups

* Memes

* Hacking and Activism

* Video on the Web

* Asia and the Web

If you are interested, they are soliciting 300 – 500 word abstracts by 10 October 2016. If you have any questions, or wish to discuss a potential submission, please e-mail us via Ian Milligan at i2millig@uwaterloo.ca. Final chapters will be a maximum of 7,000 words and would be due by 1 March 2017.

Dedicated to French Heritage, Memories and History of the Web in the 90s, WEB90 focuses on a particularly important decade, in France as in several European countries, for digital networking’s and computing’s turn to the general public. How can we map the Web of the Nineties? Who were the key actors of its adoption and massification in France? What did Web browsing mean for Internet users of the Nineties? These questions, and many others, will be explored within the WEB90 project funded by the French National Research Agency and through this academic blog.